Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS0 was been there for a long time. AKS is the managed Kubernetes offering from Azure to host containerized applications. You can learn more about AKS from here.
Now Azure supports running Generation 2 VMs. Therefore we can take advantage of using more secure and improved performance VMs for AKS clusters.
AKS team has enabled the preview of AKS support for Gen 2 VMs. This feature is still on preview and not recommended for production usage.
Now lets see how we can use generation 2 VMs for AKS.
First we need make sure the aks-preview CLI option is installed. Then enable the feature Gen2VMPreview through Azure CLI.
az feature register --name Gen2VMPreview --namespace Microsoft.ContainerService
Next will create a new resource group
Create AKS cluster using Gen2 VMs.
az aks create --name aksgen2vmcluster --resource-group aksgen2vms -s Standard_D2s_v3 --aks-custom-headers usegen2vm=true
To create cluster it will take 10-15 min after cluster creation we can verify the VMs are used with Gen 2 as follows.
az aks list --resource-group aksgen2vms
agentPoolProfiles": [
{
"availabilityZones": null,
"count": 3,
"enableAutoScaling": null,
"enableNodePublicIp": false,
"maxCount": null,
"maxPods": 110,
"minCount": null,
"mode": "System",
"name": "nodepool1",
"nodeImageVersion": "AKSUbuntu-1804gen2-2020.11.11",
"nodeLabels": {},
"nodeTaints": null,
"orchestratorVersion": "1.18.10",
"osDiskSizeGb": 128,
"osDiskType": "Managed",
"osType": "Linux",
"powerState": {
"code": "Running"
As you see above the the cluster use the nodeImageVersion as the gen2 VM image. From above output we can verify the cluster VMs are using Gen2 Azure VMs.